From Twitter Land

AUTHOR MAKES A CASE FOR CREATIVE COMMONS ON TWITTER (Via Wired)

By its nature, Twitter is a very open and social platform for communication. Anyone is free and encouraged to tweet and retweet to his or her heart’s desire. But what if you wanted to remix or republish a tweet outside of the service in a book, film or art project?
Andy Clarke, a Web designer and author based in the U.K, stumbled across this problem, and launched a site this week that allows Twitter users to declare creative commons licenses on their Tweets and avatars. Clarke wanted to use real user content in a new DVD tutorial on web design, but his publisher needed permission from every user.
TweetCC.com allows you to send out a tweet clarifying your desired license, and stores a database of users for reference. “I think it’s the right time in the sense that collectively as more and more people get involved with this thing, the platform itself is going to be to home to a pretty substantial body of work,” said Eric Steuer, Creative Director of Creative Commons, who’s been in discussions with Clarke about TweetCC.

TWITTER PHILANTHROPY (Via csmonitor.com)

dreamsforkids sent us to find out about “Twitter Philanthropy“:

They gathered at beach resorts in Dubai, pubs in London, and a noisy cafe in Beijing. Here in New York, they flocked to a popular West Side bar. By the time the sun set on the first annual Twestival, some 10,000 attendees in 200 cities across the globe had donated more than a quarter of million dollars to clean-water efforts in Africa and India.

Welcome to the age of “social giving.” Spurred on by the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, campaigns like the Twestival, which was organized on the microblogging platform Twitter, are changing the landscape of modern philanthropy, say industry insiders.

…“You’ve got the technological ease of creating social networks. It’s not difficult anymore to create that networking function. The only difficulty is in creating the critical mass.” The Twestival, which wrapped on Feb. 12, had little trouble generating buzz. Only hours after founder Amanda Rose made public her plans for the campaign in January, the news went viral, spiraling out across hundreds of blogs and Twitter feeds. Soon, Ms. Rose had secured a small army of volunteers and a team of corporate partners including TipJoy, which allowed users to contribute directly online.“There’s a new breed of social citizen out there,” argues Fine, who writes a well-trafficked blog about the intersection of social media and activism. “I’m speaking here about millennials – the 15- to 29-year olds, for whom one of the key identifiers is a cause. A cause says something about who you are and who your friends are.”

Read the entire story here.